


An Entrance Somewhere Else

by dotfic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-18
Updated: 2009-04-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 12:39:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dotfic/pseuds/dotfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel doesn't rest much. There is work to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Entrance Somewhere Else

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: Set during the month before Family Remains; uses some elements revealed in On the Head of a Pin. The title is from Tom Stoppard. One scene is an expansion of a drabble previously posted. A lifetime's supply of pie and iced tea to [](http://smilla02.livejournal.com/profile)[**smilla02**](http://smilla02.livejournal.com/) for her wonderful insights and beta polish.

He doesn't need rest, but the human body he occupies does. Rest for him and his brothers and sisters is anywhere that they can find it. In warehouses or woods, under bridges or in homes abandoned for a week or forever. Castiel can manage to sleep without the comforts a human might require, even in this borrowed human body. He rolls up his coat as a pillow, curls on his side. He finds an empty mansion with thick rugs to lie on, which is comfortable.

Comfort. That's not something he used to consider, but he's noticing it more and more. Aches in his muscles if he sleeps on a hard floor. A hollowness in his stomach. The cold.

He doesn't dream. His vessel might have, but the man's soul is gone, a fallen soldier released to heaven and there is only Castiel wandering in the spaces of that mind. Angels don't dream, but sometimes as he's staring across bare wood floors than shine in the moonlight, he thinks about things and it's what he imagines dreaming must be like.

Another angel died tonight. Castiel swallows and closes his eyes, the heaviness within him confusing. His mind turns over what his brother's vessel looked like, the dark hair, how Ecanus blinked out at the world behind gold-rimmed spectacles. The vessel had clever, quick hands--he was a journalist, a recorder of human events. When Ecanus died, so did the man.

In the darkness, Castiel hears the soft sound of breaths, the quiet rustles as bodies stir in sleep. Four of them took shelter in the empty house, others went on to patrol, to gather information.

Castiel won't rest long. There is work to do.

* * *

"What are you doing?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Yes you do."

They're sitting in a diner, because he chose that as their meeting place. The diner serves three kinds of pie.

Ramiel gives a small twitch of her lips that could be a smile, if angels smiled the way humans did. It's neither amusement nor affection nor reprimand but it does feel affectionate. Her eyes go to the half-eaten slice of pie on his plate. Her blonde hair falls over her shoulder and she leans forward, a crease forming between her eyes.

It jostles something within him. Castiel thinks of a young woman with golden hair caught in the gleam of headlights as she knelt in the dirt holding the body of a dark-haired man in her arms.

"That," Ramiel says. "You're picking up their habits. They are..." her eyes rove around the diner, sliding over children with their parents, a muscular bald man eating at the counter, a dark-skinned elderly woman reading a book at a corner table. "...beautiful creatures. But we are here to win this war. That is all."

"Yes."

Ramiel's fingers sharpen the folds of a napkin. "You need to be more careful."

* * *

"We can handle them on our own, brother," Uriel insists. "The garrison is stretched thin as it is--let us not pull more away from their work."

That is typical of Uriel, Castiel has discovered. He protects others, strives for victory, and it gives Castiel a renewed sense of his own strength. It's comforting, and Uriel is familiar in an unfamiliar land.

Comfort, _consolation_.

Uriel waits for his agreement, and Castiel can feel how he's restraining himself, the tension in him. He's noticing more and more the jostling impatience of the bulky human body Uriel wears. Uriel used to be more still and quiet, as an angel should be.

They are in a war, and Uriel is their fiercest warrior. He's eager for the hunt.

"All right," Castiel says.

There are six demons in the crypt, there to raise the corpse of a necromancer and break another seal. The demons were human souls once upon a time, rather than fallen angels.

Uriel lunges, grabs one and presses his hand to its forehead. A crowbar clatters to the stone floor, the light flares, the demon goes to its destruction before its companions seem to realize what now stands among them.

Once they do, several rush at Castiel with their eyes black. He punches the first one in the face, then kicks the second in the stomach. He grabs a third and lifts his hand towards the demon's forehead.

Angels don't dream and they aren't supposed to remember as humans do, but the quick flicker of images overwhelms him--Alastair's smile, Castiel's useless hand. Alastair is not of Lucifer's kin, but more powerful than they'd known--almost as strong as Lilith. Castiel's failure could happen again. His hand pauses, caught; he wonders why his muscles will not obey him.

Uriel bellows at him. Castiel presses his hand to the demon's forehead and kills it with a burn of light.

He turns and catches the last trace of that illumination against Uriel's face, where satisfaction flares. Angels aren't supposed to have emotions such as those (so Castiel has been told), but the pride on Uriel's face warms him.

In this long battle, he's not sure what he would do without Uriel's strength.

* * *

The thirty-second seal requires the death of two psychics under a red moon. Lilith's people capture them before the angels discover the plan and can prevent the kidnapping.

"We should have acted sooner." Ramiel's calm snaps like a sail in a sharp wind, for all her advising him to be careful, her warnings about the danger of human emotion. She presses her hand against the porch railing of the house in Kansas where they'd arrived too late. "We are failing, Castiel."

Castiel raises his head, looks at the simple house covered in shadows. "There is time, sister. We'll save them." Castiel lets out a breath and wonders at the relief he feels. He doesn't tell Ramiel -- she would frown and give him more warnings.

But Castiel knows the name of the psychic who owns this house, and the name of the other that the demons took. (He wonders at the demons' hubris, if they are merely oblivious, or arrogant, or just plain stupid).

Somehow he doesn't think this seal will be permitted to break, even if he and Ramiel are poor soldiers on this mission.

They won't be, though. Castiel won't be.

Dean would never forgive him.

* * *

Castiel uses Sam's receptive mind to send the Winchesters a vision before he and Ramiel fly to the warehouse.

They are not surprised to find that the demons have painted wards on the walls. They cannot get in. The wards mean the demons can't sense their presence outside, either. It is a drawback of using more powerful sigils.

Castiel rubs at the dirty glass and peers in, hearing voices.

The woman named Missouri Mosely sits with her back straight, hands tied behind her back in the middle of the circle the demons drew in chalk on the floor. She stares at the demons, her broad form exuding disapproval and a silence that is almost as terrible and bright as angelic wrath.

Next to her, similarly bound, Pamela Barnes curses them in a furious, low burst of words, her head turning sightlessly as if she wants to make sure all four demons get the full strength of her fury. Somehow her cursing is less frightening than Miss Mosley's silence, but Castiel sees why the Winchesters are fond of both of them.

Their strength may not lie with guns and knives, but they are hunters.

Castiel and Ramiel keep searching for a way in while the night grows colder and the moon starts its descent. Sam and Dean were four hours away, as Castiel calculated it, assuming their vehicle went at its fastest.

They arrive in three.

* * *

It's over quickly. Dean kicks in an eroded wooden door, breaking a sigil as he mutters about something called _kryptonite_ and the uselessness of heaven-given power if a little bit of chalk is going to keep you out.

Sam raises his hand and expels the demon from one host in a stream of dark smoke. He gasps for breath and wipes the thin trickle of blood from his upper lip aftwards. Blind though she is, Pamela Barnes turns her head towards Sam as if she can see him, her shoulders stiffening. Ramiel and Castiel destroy the rest of the demons, the humans they rode slumping unconscious to the floor, and then Dean unties the captives.

Scrambling to her feet, Pamela Barnes shakes off Sam's grasp while Dean helps Missouri Mosely up using a differential touch and a manner Castiel has never seen from him before.

"For heaven's sake, boy, I'm fine. Quit fussin'. Took you long enough to get here."

"Yeah, sorry," Dean says, and Castiel can't detect a hint of sarcasm anywhere.

When Dean pulls away, Miss Mosely pats him on the arm in a way that contradicts the sharpness of her tone. Castiel tries to sort this, to fit it with what he knows about humans, about Dean and the people who matter to him.

Then she turns to Dean's brother. "Sam," she says, with great tenderness.

"Hey, ma'am," Sam says, lowering his head. He looks younger in her presence.

"It's good to see you." Miss Mosely clasps his hand. Her smile fades. "What are you doing, honey? _What are you doing?_ "

"I..." Sam looks down at his hand closed around hers. There's confusion in his face, sadness, and then his expression smooths and goes blank, concealing his uncertainty. He pulls his hand free. "I don't..."

There's a sharp hiss of indrawn breath. Pamela Barnes' fingers clench around Miss Mosely's arm.

"Castiel," she says, her voice low and tight. She's the only human who pronounces it correctly, Casti- _el._ His true name is a collection of sounds no human could possibly utter; it pleases him that she understands how to say the false one, that she respects it.

(He doesn't mind when Dean calls him "Cas" nearly as much as he should.)

It feels like everyone in the room snaps their gaze to him, including Ramiel. She's stayed back, in the shadows and away from the humans, a ghost-like form in the white clothes she favors.

Dean steps in front of Castiel, blocking his view of Pamela Barnes. There's no mistaking the way his face has become closed and hard-edged. The restrained tension in him is as palpable as the heat from a fire, the warning and the threat.

"I am sorry," Castiel says, leaning to see her past Dean's shoulder. "I am truly sorry." And he is. Regret, _sorrow or remorse_. "I did warn you--"

"Fuck off," Pamela Barnes says, turns and walks out. Sam goes after her.

Castiel isn't aware of it, but something must have been in his face because the hardness in Dean's softens a fraction. "What'd you expect, man?"

Miss Mosely walks towards Castiel. "Well," she says. "I consider myself a God-fearing woman and who am I to disrespect a messenger of the Lord, but going around burning innocent people's eyes out? And what about the way you kept comin' at Dean in your true form, breaking glass and damaging property and scaring him half out of his mind--"

"I was _not_ scared--" Dean starts.

But Miss Mosley goes on as if he hasn't spoken. "Oh, I know about you. Dean and Sam don't tell me enough. But they tell me a little." She pauses to smack Dean on the back of his head. Dean hunches his shoulders while Miss Mosley ignores his scowl. "But they call me psychic for a reason and I've known these boys since they were this big and it seems to me you and your kind have brought them nothing but more grief."

"It's...there is a bigger picture..." Castiel suddenly seems to have forgotten how to use human language.

"Yes, I know. The apocalypse, the sixty-six seals." She clicks her tongue against her teeth. "Look at you. You're a mess." She touches his raincoat, showing no fear at all, her fingers finding where the cloth is blood-stained. "When's the last time you had your coat cleaned, child?"

Child. It is not inaccurate; he is a child of God and here on earth, there is too much that's new and overwhelming.

"They are..." He glances at Dean.

Dean holds up his hands, a small lopsided smile on his face as he backs away, denying Castiel rescue. "Let's get you home, Missouri."

"In a moment, sugar."

Dean waits for Missouri Mosely to finish, standing several yards away, the warrior attendant to a seer.

She turns back to Castiel and studies him for a long time, until he feels restless and uncomfortable. Her hand flattens against his raincoat, over his vessel's heart. The hollow, dank space of the warehouse feels larger and darker and quieter.

"Castiel," she says, her voice quiet. "You need to take more care."

"I perform my duties as well as I can," he says, feeling the need to justify the quality of his work.

"That isn't what I meant," she says. Her hand drops away from him.

He thinks there is pity in her eyes.

* * *

Another angel is dead, found with his grace carved out. Mihr and his sturdy, broad-shouldered vessel with all the tattoos (one of them a phoenix over the words _semper fidelis_ ) and the scratchy voice and red hair.

Castiel is growing accustomed to the feeling of loss.

* * *

Uriel would not approve.

The decision is not premeditated. _Impulsive,_ Castiel identifies the feeling. It goes with _restless_ and _uncomfortable_ and _pity_ and _happy_ and _longing_.

There's a strong wind that day, people bracing with jackets, scarves, and gloves against the bright cold. The wind stings his eyes into tears that he wipes away. He looks down at the wetness on his fingers, puts his finger to his tongue and tastes the salt.

Whatever the reason (he pushes down _curiosity_ as an explanation; he has been warned, by more than just Ramiel) he wanders into the small shop. It smells musty, of old cloth, dust, vinyl, and varnished wood. The place sells the cast-off items of human lives, objects no one wants any more: chipped teacups, mugs with words on the side that he can't guess the significance of (phrases like "same shit, different day" and "bite me!"), books.

He finds a metal box with a black handle. On the side there's an image of men with wild, curly black hair, their faces painted white, red tongues sticking out. They're holding guitars, the letters KISS above them. Castiel picks up the box, turns it to one side, then the other. He has no idea why such a box would have the word KISS on it, with that picture, but he suddenly thinks of fingers drumming rhythmically against a steering wheel, of the sharp tang of sarcasm. Castiel leaves the box where he found it.

On the wall he finds a picture, a pale washed-out brown, men with the sun in their faces, smiling. They're wearing leather jackets, the wings of a behemoth metal machine spread wide behind them, as if it would shelter them.

He reaches up and takes down the picture. Touches his finger to the glass. He can't say why, but looking at the group and their metal-winged bird makes him feel almost like _longing_ , only that's not quite what he means. It's a contradiction, as so many things are since he took on this vessel. How can he long for something he feels he already has; miss something he hasn't realized he's lost?

Castiel puts the picture back in its place and leaves the store.

* * *

He finds Dean and Sam in the parking lot of a motel, a long skinny building with flaking red paint and bright blue doors.

"What do you want?" Dean snaps, putting his shotgun away in the trunk.

Handing his shotgun and a canister of salt to Dean, Sam gives Castiel a wary look. They both have tired eyes and a layer of pale gray dust covering their clothes. There's a bandage wrapped around Sam's hand, stained with spots of dark red.

Castiel has no reason to be there, he realizes with a jolt of panic. _Panic - noun. 1. a sudden overwhelming fear, with or without cause, that produces hysterical or irrational behavior, and that often spreads quickly through a group of persons or animals. 2. an instance, outbreak, or period of such fear._

"I may need to ask you for something, soon. I want to be sure you're prepared to do this."

In a remote way, he is aware that he is both lying and telling the truth. He will need to ask Dean for something. But it is not time yet and it is not why he's there now, in that Indiana dusk.

"You know what, Cas? We're a little busy." Dean slams the trunk shut and walks over to the motel room door, key in hand.

He goes inside and slams the door behind him.

Sam fists his uninjured hand against his mouth, coughs. "We've had a lot of...hunts...lately," he says. It almost sounds like he's trying to apologize for his brother, but Castiel doubts that's what he means. There is too much of a warning in his voice; it makes him think of the way Dean's face looked when he stepped between Castiel and the psychic Pamela Barnes. "We have to be on the road at dawn," Sam continues. "Zombies, maybe. In Lafayette."

Castiel can't seem to stop looking at the red stains on the bandage. He almost tells Sam _be careful_ , but there are too many things that Sam needs to be careful of, and for.

With a funny little shrug of his shoulders, again almost like, but not at all, apology, Sam moves past Castiel and goes inside.

There's a burst of noise from the motel room, a television; he can hear Sam and Dean's voices rising over it.

His presence has stirred things up, the way silt that has settled to the bottom of a pond will rise if somebody throws in a rock. He will need Dean's help soon. This was a mistake. This was wrong. He makes up his mind to restrain his own impulses.

As he lets loose his wings, stirring the debris lying on the cement before the motel recedes from his vision, Castiel recognizes that he has twisted things around backwards.

Since when does he have to work against his impulses, or need restraint?

* * *

A displacement of air and the sound of wind let Castiel know he's no longer alone in the very top row of the band shell seating.

"Hello, Tagas," he says to the angel who has appeared in the seat beside his.

"Castiel." Tagas sounds amused. "Are you moping?"

She can afford that note of humor in her voice. Unlike Ramiel, unlike Uriel, she seems less afraid of the taints and doubts. He has known Tagas for a long time--Tagas' faith is firm. Tagas will not fall. Unlike Anna, who rejected everything she was created to be.

Unlike himself. Castiel has learned to be properly afraid, and even his fear is a forbidden thing.

"I am not...moping," he says, rolling the unfamiliar word over his tongue. "I am listening to music."

Tagas leans forward and rests her elbows on her knees. Her vessel is long-legged and dark-skinned. She was some kind of athlete, once, isn't any more. A leather band holds up her curly dark hair.

"Brahms? Don't you think Beethoven is more your style?" The sound of strings and horns and piano flows up to them. "Or is it Metallica now?" She adds, and he can't mistake the playfulness in her voice.

Castiel gives her a slow, sideways look. "Tagas..."

She is always dancing on the edge, but he believes she will never fall.

"You need to be more careful." Tagas watches the distant musicians on the stage.

"I am always careful."

"Another seal has broken." She inclines her head, a curl of hair falling forward over a sharp cheekbone. "We failed."

He tilts his head back to see the stars. They are as remote as the father whose face he's never seen. "We are losing this war."

"No." She sounds like Ramiel now, voice gone flat and certain. "We cannot." This is not a protest against his words. It is a fact, for all of them.

They cannot lose this war.

* * *

It is not his job, or his place, to perch on Dean's shoulder. Dean is an instrument, a tool of heaven, nothing more. A delicately constructed weapon that's starting to come apart.

The garrison stops two more seals from breaking. In between, Castiel looks in on the Winchesters, tells himself it's information gathering. He doesn't approach this time. He watches while they battle a pack of black dogs. They don't need his interference to win a battle that is well within their habitual paths.

Dean has the hollow-eyed look of exhaustion, though he shoots with precision and never falters; Sam is watchful and protective. The way Dean carries himself, his easy confidence with his weapons and his work, Castiel's not sure he's aware of this manner in Sam, the way Sam keeps checking on him.

The brothers stand together in the flicker of the bonfire they build to burn the corpses of the slain creatures, shotguns hanging loose in their hands, shoulders a few inches apart.

Sam raises his head as if scenting the air, and Castiel draws away before Sam can see or sense him. Dean doesn't appear to notice anything but the fire and his own tiredness. He yawns, rubs the back of his neck, and then Sam douses the fire, takes up a shovel and starts to dig before Dean can.

There are breaks forming in Sam, too, hair thin, in danger of widening. He and Dean both try to hide, from others, even from each other.

He's not sure he understands the why or how, but Castiel sees the way their cracks line up and keep them both from crumbling.

Doubt rises in him. Maybe the weapon they need has more than one piece.

* * *

They cannot lose this war.

Soon he will have to ask Dean Winchester to do something. The thought has weight, as if it would tug his wings to earth. There's something else mixed with it, like _regret_. Like _fear_.

It is not for himself.

Castiel stands in the middle of a busy train station, letting humanity jostle him, and is no longer sure what must be done to win. He tilts his head back, stares up at the high vaults of the ceiling.

 _Tired._ He feels tired. He yawns, rubs the back of his neck, and feels the odd stretch in his jaw, down the sides of his face. Not only the body he wears, but also his own being feels sore and faded with exhaustion, and that, like so many other things, is also brand new.

There is too much work to do.

He won't rest long.

~end

  
additional notes:  
+angel information from <http://www.angel-guide.com/names-angels.html> and <http://www.angel-guide.com/hierarchy-angels.html>  
+definitions from <http://dictionary.reference.com>  



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